The European Network for Short Fiction Research was established in 2013 with the aim of fostering and promoting the study of short fiction in European universities and in interaction with short fiction writers. After an inaugural meeting early in 2014, the ENSFR has organized annual conferences as well as sponsored several other study days and events. This website aims to be an interactive platform for sharing research, expertise, ideas and information about short fiction in its diversity of linguistic traditions and forms.
Dear ENSFR members,
Over the last couple of months we have set up a new communication group to enhance the network’s ability to share information about events, publications and call for papers.
If you have any information on events, publications and call for papers that you would like to be shared and posted on the ENSFR’s social media channels or/and website please email: ensfrcg@gmail.com.
Best wishes,
Paul Knowles (ENSFR Communication Officer)
The ENSFR reading group
The ENSFR reading group aims to provide a digital space for early career researchers and postgraduate students to come together and discuss classic and new short fiction. The reading group is co-coordinated by Maddie Sinclair (University of Warwick), Paul Knowles (University of Manchester) and Ines Gstrein (University of Innsbruck).
The group usually meets once per month during term time on Zoom. The link to the meeting room is circulated in advance via a mailing list, together with the set reading for the next meeting. For each meeting, there is a short story to read. There are also some questions to guide our reading and get the discussion started.
New members are always welcome! To sign up for the reading group, please send an email to the contact email address of the reading group: ensfrreadinggroup[at]gmail.com
Blue Short Stories
Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)
Guest editors : Bénédicte Meillon, Université d’Angers, and Frédérique Spill, Université Jules Vernes Picardie
Since the turn of the century, the stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be indissoluble from the threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of the ocean, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. As a matter of fact, we have come to realize that the future of our predominantly blue Earth and its myriad co-dwellers hinges in great part on the blueing of our minds. Following the recent “blue turn” in the humanities and ecocriticism, which seeks to remedy the rampant “ocean deficit disorder” diagnosed by Dan Brayton and to draw our attention beyond “green,” land-based issues to “blue” ones, the call for papers for this volume arises from the awareness that blue short stories deserve more attention that they have been getting. This special issue of the JSSE will consequently focus on blue short stories, i.e. short stories dealing with marine matters and, more largely, aquatic and terraqueous beings and places in ways that depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to explore short stories that help us venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge, and that may thus promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life. Continue reading “CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 1 November 2024”
The 17th International Conference on the Short Story in English directed by Dr Maurice A. Lee will take place in Killarney, Ireland, in June 2025.
Theme: “How it Works: The Uniqueness of the Short Story.”
Often, the short story is defined by what it is not: the novel. Yet perhaps the better question to ask is what does it uniquely offer that other forms of fiction cannot? What effect does the concentration of story and human experience into a few thousand words have on the reader? The shortness of form puts focus on individual experience, containing ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness’ (Frank O’Connor). It is a form that insists on removing everything non-essential and demands a ‘large deal of detection’ (Mary Lavin). This spareness requires total concentration from its reader to understand its profound wordless elements. Most importantly it seduces, with seeming simplicity, calling on our empathy; it creates a ‘transference of emotion’ (James Joyce) with a few carefully crafted lines. It is a form that is effortful, in some respects, for the reader, yet maintains a keen focus and is unmatched in its precision. What is so unique about this conference is that writers of fiction in English (Irish, British, American, Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, South Africa, Indian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, etc.) and writers who have had their work translated into English, together with scholars of the genre will all come together to discuss that seductive unmatched precision.
Further details on the conference website.
Short Fiction Theory and Practice
‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University
“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971. ShrThroughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.
The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.
Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:
Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage, by clicking the submissions tab here https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.
For style guide and submission details, please see https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.
For further enquiries, please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is extended to 15 November 2024.
NB: This call for papers was produced before Andrea Robin Skinner, Alice Munro’s daughter, made public revelations about her stepfather in the summer of 2024. The guest editors will pay due attention to this event and its repercussions in their editorial to the issue.
Conference in Celebration of Flannery O’Connor’s 100th Birthday Nicolaus Copernicus University; Toruń, Poland; March 25-26, 2025. Click here for First Call for Papers. Email inquiries to Professors Grzegorz Koneczniak (gregorex at umk.pl) and Mirosława Buchholtz (mirabuch at umk.pl). (Proposals Due November 15, 2024)
“The Persistence of the Short Story: Traditions and Futures” — 10-12 July 2024, University of Mainz, Germany
The Society for the Study of the American Short Story, The American Literature Association, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, in collaboration with the ENSFR, have organized a three-day seminar series on the short story.
Here is the link to the programme: https://www.obama-institute.com/shortstoryconferencemainz2024/
You are invited to submit a full article for possible inclusion in a special issue of Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies. The issue theme is “Theorizing Short Story Practice in the 21st Century.”
It has been thirty years since Charles E. May edited the influential The New Short Story Theories (1994). In those thirty years, Creative Writing programs from undergraduate to PhD levels have grown from a few specific sites to become a pan-global provision. This proliferation has been further increased by the Covid-19 pandemic, with online MA programs now offered alongside traditional face-to-face programs.
While some critics argue that this widening of the curriculum leads to a production line of writers, there is clear evidence that Creative Writing is one of the last crafts to become widely offered in universities (Cowan, 2022). Far from producing uniform writers, it has instead precipitated the emergence of contemporary fiction with a range of voices that are reimagining the short story across genres.
Furthermore, this widening of participation has led to a growth of experimental writing by marginalized people. It is the emerging strategies of these writers, and the new forms and stylistics of their writing, that require a re-evaluation of short story practice and theory.
The guest editor is interested in short story practice and stylistics, and how narrators can be used for what Brian Richardson (2015) terms as “unnatural narratives,” specifically what he calls “oppositional literature” by minority or oppressed groups, such as working-class writers, people of color, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized writers. The editor is especially interested in work where these marginalized positions intersect. How can narrative strategies be employed by writers to build storyworlds that communicate the lived experience of characters? How might these contemporary stories implicate readers in the events of the narrative?
Submissions of 6,000-8,000 words should be sent to guest editor Andrew McDonnell (andrew.mcdonnell@ieg.ac.uk) and to Storyworlds’ editors Avril Tynan (avril.tynan@utu.fi) and Benjamin Williams (benjamiw@andrew.cmu.edu) by July 31, 2024. Submissions should follow the journal’s submission guidelines.
‘People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.’
(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971)
Throughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.
The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.
Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:
Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage, by clicking the submissions tab here https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.
For style guide and submission details, please see https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.
For further enquiries, please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 1 September 2024.
Join us in Le Mans, France for a stimulating two-day conference focused on the life and works of one of the most versatile, prolific and influential British writers of the 20th century: W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). This conference aims to provide a platform for scholars, researchers, and enthusiasts to engage in a comprehensive reassessment of Maugham’s contributions to short stories, novels, essays, theatre, travel, film adaptations, and international cultural transfers. It will unravel the layers of Maugham’s literary tapestry and assess his legacy. We look forward to welcoming you to this enriching academic event, to be followed by paper and/or online publications.
The distinguished scholars in the field of literature and Maugham studies who will deliver insightful talks during the conference will be announced soon.
In 2004, after reading Jeffrey Meyers’ Somerset Maugham: A Life, reviewer Anthony Daniels asked the question bluntly: “How Good Was Maugham?” (Daniels). His personal answer was that Maugham had made his “the virtue of clarity” at a time when modernism looked down on it. He also contended that Maugham preferred to let his readers deduce the “inner turmoil of his characters” from their behaviour, which led to the charge that he was “a mere observer of externals without much in the way of a soul” (Daniels). Yet Maugham’s soul and heart are precisely what makes Maugham an arresting figure for Daniels: he rather regards him as terrified by his own emotions, not detached at all but needing to prevent himself from “break[ing] down altogether,” being constantly torn between the contradictory desires for “freedom and license” on the one hand, and “social respectability and observance of social convention” on the other (Daniels).
Although (or because) Maugham’s popularity hardly ever waned, and he could still be paid §500 for a two-minute radio talk in 1939 or sell a story to a magazine for §25,000 in 1941 (Hastings 535, 560), he was keenly aware of how condescending or dismissive of the quality of his books critics could prove to be when any new work of his came to their attention. In 1940, an insulting phrase from a review of his previous collection of short stories prompted him to call his next such publication The Mixture as Before. Eight years later, he summarised the usually unfavourable opinion of his reviewers thus in the introduction to Quartet, his first anthology film: “In my twenties the critics said I was brutal; in my thirties they said I was flippant; in my forties they said I was cynical; in my fifties they said I was competent; and then in my sixties they said I was superficial” (Quartet 3’20”-3’31”).
Yet, as has now been fully proven, Maugham’s allegedly ranking himself “in the very first row of the second-raters” is apocryphal (Blackburn and Arsov 139), and though usually modest about his own gifts, Maugham did occasionally state his good points, as in the following quote from his autobiography, The Summing Up: “I had an acute power of observation, and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed” (qtd. in Hastings 520). This led some critics to claim that Maugham’s writing “deserves to be judged entirely on its own merits, as does his legacy as one of the most prolific and popular writers of modern times” (Blackburn and Arsov 148).
Well may they say so, seeing that “the English Maupassant” (MacCarthy) achieved literary prowess across genres, his notable works spanning not only novels (Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, The Razor’s Edge, etc.) and short story collections (The Trembling of a Leaf, The Casuarina Tree, etc.), but also plays (The Circle, Our Betters, Sheppey, The Constant Wife, etc.), travelogues (The Land of the Blessed Virgin, On a Chinese Screen, The Gentleman in the Parlour), essays (Ten Novels and Their Authors, The Vagrant Mood, Points of View, etc.) and memoirs (The Summing Up, A Writer’s Notebook, Looking Back). In Michael House’s documentary Revealing Mr. Maugham, novelist and essayist Pico Iyer even goes so far as to praise the power of Maugham’s quietly subversive prose over the somewhat arrogant modernist ambitions of literary luminaries like James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf: “I think, in some ways, he was more effectively fearless than any of them because his subject matter was just as way out as theirs were, and yet he placed it in a frame that anybody could read. That ability both to shock you and to put you at ease at the same time is what most of us aspire to, and almost nobody has, but he had instinctively” (House 1’50”-2’07”).
In the wake of the 125th anniversary of Maugham’s birth (in 1874) and in celebration of the 60th anniversary of his demise (in 1965), the time has thus come to honour one of the most widely read and adapted, revered and dismissed, prolific and versatile British writers of the 20th century, and to reassess not only his extensive body of works but also his contribution to English-language literature, his international aura, his afterlives and legacy. That this conference will take place not only in France, the country Maugham called home for several decades, but also in Le Mans, where his maternal grandmother resided for the last eighteen years of her life, will make it the perfect venue for a long-overdue critical reassessment.
Organised by Le Mans’ “Labo 3L.AM” research unit—in partnership with Sorbonne Université’s VALE, Rennes 2’s ACE, and Angers’ CIRPaLL—this conference will welcome papers in line with two of the Labo 3L.AM’s research focuses. These focuses revolve around the dialectics between popular and high culture, and around the cultural transfers or circulations of knowledge made possible by works of all kinds, as evidenced by their reception, adaptation, translation, or appropriation by international readers, critics, and academics (“Les Axes de Recherche”). In addition, to make this interdisciplinary conference a stimulating and groundbreaking event for all participants, we also invite submissions on a wide range of topics related to Maugham’s protean output, including but not limited to:
Blackburn, Daniel and Alexander Arsov. “W. Somerset Maugham’s Apocryphal ‘Second-Rate’ Status: Setting the Record Straight.” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 59.2 (Dec. 2015): 139-52. Print.
Calder, Robert. Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham. London: Heinemann, 1989. Print.
Chemmachery, Jaine. “Les nouvelles sur l’empire de Rudyard Kipling et de Somerset Maugham: une écriture ambivalente des discours orientaliste et exotique.” Représentations dans le monde anglophone (June 2015): 75-90. Print.
—. “Spatial, Temporal and Linguistic Displacement in Kipling’s and Maugham’s Colonial Short Stories: The Disrupting Power of the ‘Colonial’ in Modern Short Fiction.” Journal of the Short Story in English 64 (Spring 2015): 47-65. Web and Print. https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1558
Cordell, Richard A. Somerset Maugham: A Biographical and Critical Study. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1961. Print.
—. Writers and their Work: Somerset Maugham. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1982. Print.
Curtis, Anthony. The Pattern of Maugham. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974. Print.
Daniels, Anthony. “How good was Maugham? On Somerset Maugham by Jeffrey Meyers.” New Criterion 22.6 (Feb. 2004): 19-26. Print. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=113523055. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024. Web.
Dottin, Paul. Somerset Maugham et ses romans. Paris: Perrin, 1928. Print.
—. Le théâtre de Somerset Maugham. Paris: Perrin, 1937. Print.
Floc’h and Rivière. Villa Mauresque. Paris: Table Ronde, 2013. Print.
Hastings, Selina. The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham. London: Murray, 2009. E-book.
House, Michael. Revealing Mr. Maugham. Artumentary. 2012. 83 mins. Film.
Jonas, Klaus W. William Somerset Maugham: The Man and His Work / Leben und Werk. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009. Print.
Jonas, Klaus W, ed. The World of Somerset Maugham: An Anthology. London: Peter Owen, 1950. Print.
Lachazette, Xavier. “Images and the Colonial Experience in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Casuarina Tree (1926).” Journal of the Short Story in English 56 (Spring 2011): 153-63. Web and Print. https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1129
—. “Not-So-Close Encounters: Empire and Emotional Atrophy in W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘P. & O.’ and ‘Masterson.’” Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Encounters in the English-speaking World: Rethinking the Other. Eds. C. Duboin, F. Pellegry, and G. Révauger. Alizés, Revue angliciste de La Réunion 43 (Dec. 2023). https://alizes.univ-reunion.fr/185. Web.
“Les Axes de Recherche : Axe 3 / Axe 2.” 3L.AM. Le Mans Université. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024. https://3lam.univ-lemans.fr/fr/les-axes-de-recherche/axe-3-cultures-de-jeunesse-en-mouvement-pratiques-productions-reception.html / https://3lam.univ-lemans.fr/fr/les-axes-de-recherche/axe-2-conflits-histoire-s-ecritures-representations.html
Lhomme, Michel. “Willie derrière la chambre: exotisme et malice de la mélancolie homosexuelle.” Dossier Somerset Maugham. Michel Lhomme, ed. Inverses: Littératures, Arts, Homosexualités 21-22. Paris: Société des Amis d’Axieros, 2022. 51-73. Print.
MacCarthy, Desmond. “Somerset Maugham: ‘The English Maupassant.’ An Appreciation.” Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine 91 (May 1933): 12-15, 66-68. Rpt. London: Heinemann, 1934. Print.
Maugham, Robin. Somerset and All the Maughams. London: Longmans Heinemann, 1966. Print.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2004. Print.
Morgan, Ted. Maugham: A Biography. New York: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Print.
Nakano, Yoshio. Samasetto Mōmu kenkyū [romanised] [Studies on Maugham]. Tokyo: Eihosha, 1954. Print.
Pillai, Gayatri Thanu and Chitra Sankaran. “Fallen Women: Land, Nature and Memsahibs in Maugham’s Southeast Asian Stories.” Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature 15.2 (Dec. 2021): 30-46.
Quartet: Four Stories by W. Somerset Maugham [1948]. Screenplays by R.C. Sherriff. Dir. Ralph Smart (“The Facts of Life”), Harold French (“The Alien Corn”), Arthur Crabtree (“The Kite”) and Ken Annakin (“The Colonel’s Lady”). Network. 2007. 114 mins. DVD.
Raphael, Frederic. Somerset Maugham and his World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Print.
Tan, Twan Eng. The House of Doors. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2023. Print.
“List of Works by W. Somerset Maugham.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Accessed 7 Mar. 2023. Web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_W._Somerset_Maugham
Stott, Raymond Toole. A Bibliography of the Works of W. Somerset Maugham. Rev. and extended ed. London: Kaye & Ward, 1973. Print.
Abstracts and bio-bibliographical details will be submitted in one .docx (.doc, .rtf or .odt) file via the Conference Submission Portal. Please avoid other formats. Do not submit PDFs.
For general inquiries, please contact the organising committee at maugham-le-mans@sciencesconf.org, or visit the Confe111rence website at https://maugham-le-mans.sciencesconf.org.